jeudi, août 30, 2007

jean jacques perrey 08 07

Jean-Jacques Perrey has become my electronic grand-pa; I think that we did a great job together with his filmed portrait. He said yes to every suggestion I made, never said a negative word about anything. He's not nostalgic and still looking forward: the future is coming, he's not a salt statue. He is the most positive old person I've ever met; the only fear he has is about our world, climate and nature, the spoiled planet we made. Thanks for being such an example!

slovenia beehive painting
A nice exhibition about old slovenian beehives paintings, at the Jardin du Luxembourg. This one looks exactly like a Marcel Dzama's painting. Beehives are the thermometers of the world; check the bees out and you'll know where we go.

grenouille2

Or you can check the frog as it's checking you..

3 femmes

It's a very rare moment, to have Florence's mom, Flo and my mom together in Alsace. My mom is the small one on the right. She's a painter, she's very good at oil painting and pastels. She's living in this area in Mulhouse called cité, near the new cité manifeste.

flo fleurs

mardi, août 28, 2007

Georges2Ondioline

Part of my Jean-Jacques Perrey's documentary is about Georges Jenny, the man he worked for in the fifties. We went together with Jean-Jacques to the massif de la Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble and stayed two days in a small hôtel-restaurant, very close to the monastery where this film was shot. We continued our Jenny pilgrimage by visiting the sanatorium in Saint Hilaire du Touvet, where he invented his synthesizer, the Ondioline in 1938. The Ondioline was Perrey's trade mark in France and America. It was made by disabled persons in protected ateliers. Jenny was doing a cure and asked for a calm room for completing his research; the director offered him... the morgue. Flirting with death was a specificity of this prehistorical electronic instrument. During our drive to Saint Hilaire du Touvet, Jean-Jacques told me that he was doing his electronic Ondioline show with the young Jacques Brel in the fifties, since they shared the same manager. Brel and him were too poor and used to have dinner at the very famous restaurant La Coupole, an expensive one. But what they asked for dinner was: radis & beurre and a lot of bread. I regret I couldn't film while driving because a lot of interesting anecdotes like this would have been nice to use. But many of them were too private for a public project and will remain secret, they'll be my personal bonus.

jeudi, août 16, 2007

rappatoog

Sorry for the long silence but I was completing my metamorphosis. Or, rather, rapamorphosing. I know that I'm a bit late, but I'm a slow person. So this was a very slow rapamorphosis. It has something to do with my slow BPM life pace, around 65.

vendredi, août 03, 2007

Isidore Isou, creator of the global poetry movement called Lettrisme, died the last week in Paris. He was 85 years old. I went to see his 1952 movie, "Traité de bave et d'éternité" (what a gorgious title) a few years ago, but never read his work. He inspired Guy Debord who, I guess (I've never read Guy Debord), stole a lot of ideas and concepts in Isou's obscure work. People like Isidore Isou don't have the regular charisma for public success. Isou also had a very bad temper, as it seems. Isidore was a kind of a toqué. But he was preparing the sixties revolution bien avant tout le monde, since 1945. Isou was also the last Rumanian coming to France for waking up our language and soul. I consider that all the modern times come from Rumania, through Tzara. Isidire Isou was from a city, Botosani, I visited in 1990. For me, the Rumanians are naturally poetic geniuses. Something that doesn't exist anywhere else shows up when they write poetry. Tristan Tzara, an other Rumanian, fed with the writings of Urmuz (a Rumanian pre-dadaist, who wrote around 1905), created a poetry magazine in Paris with Ilarie Voronca, an other rumanian poet. Tzara was far below Voronca as a poet, but who has ever heard of Voronca? Ilarie Voronca is one of my favorite poet of all times. And he is Rumanian; parisian and rumanian.